The Name I Crossed Off My Emergency Card

The Weeks After

A right knee replacement means no driving for about six weeks. Physical therapy was at the clinic in our town, three times a week, at seven-thirty in the morning, so it wouldn’t eat my whole day.

I thought Vicki would make it to the first few and then the excuses would start.

I was wrong. She was in my driveway at 7:05 every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with the heater running and a coffee in the cup holder for me.

She’d help me down my porch steps one at a time. She’d load the walker into the back seat.

The physical therapist was a big cheerful girl named Amber who made me pedal a little bike and lift my leg with a strap until I said things I’m not proud of.

Vicki sat in the plastic chair by the wall the whole hour, every time. Some days she’d read. Some days she’d just watch.

One morning in the second week, Amber had me doing the stairs, and my knee locked up and I nearly cried.

Vicki got up out of that chair and came and stood one step below me with her hands out, not touching me, just there.

“You’ve got it, Mom,” she said. “One more.”

I did one more.

The money came every Friday. Vicki put it in an envelope and left it on my kitchen table, a hundred dollars in twenties, with a sticky note on top.

The first one just said Week 1. By week ten they said things like Week 10, you’re walking better than me.

She told Tim the truth the night of my surgery, like she said she would. Tim told me later that he went out and sat in his truck for twenty minutes afterward so he wouldn’t say something he’d regret.

Then he came back in and told her he’d cover my rent until she was caught up, and that she’d better be.

He never did go out to Shane’s trailer. I asked him not to, and he listened. But at Thanksgiving, when Shane came in with Vicki, Tim shook his hand and held onto it a second longer than you’d need to and said, “Good to see you, Shane. Truck running good?” Shane said yes, sir, it was running fine. Nobody else at the table knew what that was about.

Shane didn’t last till Christmas. I didn’t ask, and Vicki didn’t tell me much.

She just said one night in my kitchen, peeling potatoes, that she’d asked him a question Dottie told her to ask, and she didn’t like his answer.

I asked her what the question was. She said it was, would you have done the same for my mother?

He’d laughed, she said. Not mean. Just like it was a silly question. And that was the end of it.